Report: President Obama’s Immigration Policies Could Shield Up to 9 Million from Deportation

The Center for Immigration Studies put together a map to show immigrant removals from late 2008 to early 2015. In all just over 400,000 people were deported in the U.S. with Harris County, Texas ranking third.

President Barack Obama’s changes to the nation’s immigration system could offer protection from deportation to 87 percent of the approximately 11 million immigrants here illegally, up from 73 percent under previous guidelines, according to an analysis of those policies released Thursday.

The report by the Migration Policy Institute, an immigration think tank in Washington D.C., looked at new guidelines prioritizing which immigrants Homeland Security officials should seek to deport. It also evaluated changes to a controversial fingerprint-sharing program in city and county jails known as Secure Communities.

Attention has been focused on the core of Obama’s immigration changes, which would give nearly 5 million immigrants a work permit and shield them from deportation. That program has been tied up in legal wrangling after 26 states, led by Texas, sued the federal government and a judge temporarily halted its implementation in February.

But the legality of the other two major policy changes have not yet been contested. In a memo Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson issued in November, he outlined which immigrants the agency would urgently seek to deport, focusing on recent border crossers, those with deportation orders issued after January 2014, and serious criminals or violent offenders.

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SOURCE: Lomi Kriel
Chron.com